1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates generally to a lottery game, and more particularly to a lottery game in which a game piece accumulates points according to the performance of the participants of a sporting event.
2. Description of the Related Art
Many governments and/or gaming organizations sponsor wagering games known as lotteries. A typical lottery game entails players selecting permutations or combinations of numbers. This is followed by a “draw,” wherein the lottery randomly selects a combination or permutation of numbered balls. Prizes are awarded based on the number of matches between a player's selection and the drawn numbers. The drawn numbers are well-publicized, and multi-million-dollar-jackpot lotteries are popular throughout the world.
Lotteries have become an important source of income to governments as they shoulder much of the financial burden for education and other programs. However, as governments have grown more dependent on lotteries it has become a challenge to sustain public interest therein. One approach to invigorating lottery sales is to expand game content beyond traditional combination/permutation games in the hope that the new games will help keep current players, as well as draw in new players.
In the pursuit of new lottery games, certain goals must be met. The lottery must be able to control the payout to the player. Ideally, the payout should be the same for all players regardless of skill. Short of that, the expected payout should fall within a range, i.e., there is an acceptable lower and upper bound to the expected player payout. Even in jurisdictions where lottery games are allowed to have elements of skill, such elements may limit the market for the game. In particular, games that involve skill-based sports wagering tend to exclude potential players who enjoy following sports but who lack confidence in their ability to predict outcomes.
There are also certain features of traditional lottery games that appeal to players and that ideally should be retained as new content is developed. One of the characteristics of a traditional lottery game is that players can win a prize for achieving a specific outcome, regardless of how many other players have achieved that outcome.
For example, a typical “lotto” game requires players to choose six distinct numbers from the set of integers ranging from to 49. Once the game sales are cut off, the lottery then chooses or “draws” six integers from the same set at which point all players whose selections match 3, 4, 5, or 6 of the lottery's selections win a prize, as established by the lottery. Thus the laws of probability, not the rules of the game, control the number of winners. Moreover, players can determine whether they have won a prize without any knowledge of how other players have fared. In particular, a player will never have the disappointing experience of believing that his outcome was good enough to win a prize only to learn later that he has not won because too many other players had better outcomes.
A means of controlling the number of winners is particularly important when awarding “churn” prizes, small prizes that are won relatively frequently and that help to maintain players' interest. Without some control on the number of winners, the lottery risks having a disproportionate number of churn-prize winners, forcing it either to pay out more than it had budgeted for these prizes, or to award small prizes that players find disappointing, if not insulting.
One approach to developing new lottery games is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,656,042, which discloses a system and method for playing an interactive lottery game having results based on the outcome of sporting events. In the embodiment described in the '042 patent, the player receives a game piece listing three athletes (a basketball player, an auto racer, and a hockey player) and three upcoming sporting events in which the athletes will participate. The performance of the athletes in these events determines the value, measured in “points,” of the game piece. For example, the game piece acquires points whenever the basketball player scores a point or makes an assist. The winning game piece is the one that has the greatest accumulated point value, with ties broken by some rule decided in advance.
A limitation of the method described in the '042 patent is that it does not provide a mechanism for awarding prizes based on the number of points accumulated. In this sense, it fails to meet the expectations of traditional lottery players that meeting a specific criterion, independent of other lottery players' outcomes, should qualify a player for a prize. As disclosed, a suitable lottery game or method will not have this feature as it is impossible to say in advance how many points will be available and how they will be distributed among the athletes participating in the given events. For example, in the sample embodiment, the first portion of the ticket refers to a basketball player who will play in a game against the Los Angeles Lakers, for example. One cannot say in advance how many points will be scored against the Lakers. Even if one could say that 100 points, for example, would be scored, it is possible that 10 players could score 10 points each or that 5 players could score 20 points each. Thus it is not possible to derive a probability distribution on the total number of points a game piece might achieve, and therefore a given point level might be achieved by a very large or very small number of game pieces, even if the indicia are randomly distributed among the game pieces. As a result, prizes are necessarily based on the relative values of the game pieces.
Another method for playing a fantasy sports game related to an elimination tournament is disclosed by U. S. Pat. No. 6,669,565. This method has a substantial skill element, however, and therefore has the limitations for use with a lottery game as described above. See also Combinatorial Algorithms: Generation, Enumeration, and Search, Donald L. Kreher and Douglas R. Stinson., CRC Press, Boca Raton, Fla. 1998; and Enumerative S, Vol. 1, Richard P. Stanley, Wadsworth & Brooks/Cole, Monterrey, Calif., 1986, generally.
The present invention is therefore directed to a sporting event based lottery game wherein the lottery game result depends on the performance of competitors in the sporting event and the prize determination process does not involve any comparison among the game tickets.